[sabujp]

This is amazing work! If folks have ever wondered why suspend is so difficult to get working on linux and why debugging it is equally difficult, this is a single datapoint with lots of information about all the things that can go wrong. Even now I have a thinkpad P1G4 where the fans won't turn off automatically unless I turn them off before going into suspend. Recently I also started having crackling issues with my bluetooth headphones after resuming from suspend and had to disable node suspension there also (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire#Noticeable_audio_d...).

[Apofis]

Remarkable that it's 2025 and laptop sleep/suspend still doesn't work right on linux. I think the first time I encountered this was probably 15 years ago now?

[xondono]

Sleep & suspend doesn’t work on Windows either.

Power control is the kind of stuff that benefits from very tight integration, and PCs just don’t have that.

Firmware is seen by most vendors as a pure cost to minimize, so you get a fragmented market full of subcontractors delivering the bare minimum that is considered “working”. Manufacturers also know most people aren’t going to use a big part of the functions they’re supposed to provide to OSes, and no one is really checking them, so it’s very common for devices to have only partial support for things they supposedly do.

[washadjeffmad]

This space is problematic enough that you could reliably segfault 2017-2019 Intel MacBooks by closing the lid before unplugging HID peripherals, preventing suspend (and cooking it in your bag on the commute home).

It also plagues Windows on custom PC builds, even when there are vendor drivers. Not every component plays nicely with suspend states, ASPM, C-sates, load line calibration, etc. And while often the capability exists natively to address issues (in BIOS, Linux, etc), how many people know how to start looking?

[rikthevik]

After my (closed) gaming laptop started making annoying Windows noises earlier today, I'm led to believe that it doesn't work properly on Windows either.

It seems like it's basically hardware whack-a-mole at this point. The only reason Apple does it reasonably well is they control more of the stack and they support less hardware. The only reason Windows does it better than Linux is they have more eyes on it.

[bongodongobob]

It doesn't work right on Windows either to be fair. With a mixed laptop fleet at work, we've just disabled sleep/hibernate company wide because it causes way too many problems.

[lillecarl]

If you have a modern machine with S0 sleep, which is "modern standby" it's very much solved. What it does is it pauses all userspace processes, disables all cores but one and keeps it running on the lowest frequency. The system stays "on" but all devices go in power-saving state which is good enough for days.

So it's not really a problem unless you really wanna do deeper sleeps.

[dismalaf]

Recent Windows laptops have even more issues. My wife literally never suspends her Windows laptop for this reason. Meanwhile my Intel/Nvidia laptop running Debian works flawlessly (albeit with Nouveau drivers, gave up on the proprietary ones for reasons unrelated to suspend).

[caycep]

it's arguably not great on windows either... (see Gigabyte Aorus comment above)

[trelane]

This is highly hardware dependent. Modern hardware is complex enough that it pretty much has to explicitly support Linux or it won't work well.

I have been buying System76 for about twenty years now, and this is has not been an issue for me either.

[xtracto]

Even hibernate has problems. The power features are some of the things I wish worked better in Linux in general :(

[ycui1986]

they don’t work on Windows either. Multiple of my laptops crash when wake up 30% of the times.

[jamesdutc]

It can be really hit-or-miss, and it can be really hard to debug errors like in the post.

A lot of workarounds that are suggested for various issues are also not really viable. Some of the workarounds involve turning off different power-saving modes; however, the point of enabling sleep is often to increase the amount of usable time between charges, and turning off these power-saving modes can often dramatically shorten battery life.

But getting sleep to work (even S0ix!) is not impossible.

I have a bunch of handheld AMD 7840U and AMD 8840U devices that I have installed Arch Linux on: GPD Win Max 2, GPD Win Mini, GPD Win 4, Minisforum V3, OneXPlayer X1 Ryzen. These devices were not designed with Linux support in mind. I would be very surprised if the companies that made them ever tested them with Linux. Yet with just a small amount of work (generally fiddling with `/proc/acpi/wakeup` and `/sys/devices/*/*/*/power/wakeup` to disable sources of spurious wakeups,) I have gotten essentially flawless S0ix support (… on all but the newest OneXPlayer X1 Ryzen.)

(In general, out-of-the-box stock Linux kernel support on these devices is fantastic. Touchscreens work, pen input works, wifi and Bluetooth work well. The only gap I've seen is fingerprint reader support.)

I suspect that given how small these manufacturers are (and how small their production batches must be,) there's much less extreme-customization and tight-integration of components. This is visibly evident in the form-factors of these devices, which many millimeters thicker than they might otherwise be. (Of course, these devices are primarily advertised to a gaming audience who are eager to avoid the thermal-throttling that happens with ultra-thin devices like Surface Pro…) I partially suspect that the lack of extreme-customization, the lack of tight-integration, and the smaller production batches means that the manufacturers make much more conservative choices in components. Maybe this explains the exceptional Linux support?

[hasperdi]

Hi, do you have these tweaks published somewhere? I'm particularly interested in knowing your GPD Win Mini tweaks.

Thanks

[fulafel]

To add: for the end user, the way to easily get working suspend is to buy known-good compatible hardware.

It's been solid on every business Thinkpad for a long long time for me and consistently seems people on Windows with the same models have more sleep problems.